People, Projects and Business Books

[leunas]

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Frederick P. Brooks
Building games involves a lot more than coding, but even so nobody should try to do it without reading this classic. Some of the most famous software engineering truisms were first identified by this book, such as "adding programmers to a late software project will make it even later." Filled with enormously valuable but often-ignored insights ("every team should have a dedicated tool maker who makes tools for everyone, rather than individuals building tools for themselves that only they understand").

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd edition by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister
How do you make people efficient and productive? Give them a supportive work environment – which means a real office with a door and a window. Did you know that the best coders outperform the worst ones ten to one, yet their pay is seldom linked to their productivity? Described as "an anti-Dilbert manifesto" this book has become something of a bible at Microsoft. Peopleware takes a firmly empirical approach, backing up its conclusions with hard data from a series of coding competitions.

Postmortems from Game Developer, edited by Austin Grossman
Over the years Game Developer magazine has published a variety of postmortems on game projects both large and small. This book collects many of them together into a single, well-organized volume. You get both what went right and what went wrong: honest self-appraisal of good and bad decision-making. Read it before you start, and you can learn from other people’s mistakes without having to make them yourself.

Game Over, Press Start to Continue, by David Sheff, with new material by Andy Eddy
A thorough and fascinating history of Nintendo up through the N64; both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal thought highly of it Although the subtitle is “the maturing of Mario,” it’s not so much about the games as it is about the company’s business practices and legal battles. The author betrays a certain fear of the company’s hegemony which the GameCube generation of machines should have dispelled… but on the other hand Nintendo may be back with a vengeance if the Wii performs as expected.

Masters of Doom, by David Kushner
Game Over is about the monster Japanese corporate phenomenon that is Nintendo. This book is its flip side: the small, personal, quintessentially American entrepreneurship of id Software in the days when it produced a game that changed the world: Doom. A tale of talent, egos, imagination, obsession, money and what you have to sacrifice to be a smash hit. Here’s a hint: the phrase work-life balance does not appear in this book.

Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby
Chaplin and Ruby take a broad look at the business, partly a historical record, partly a series of interviews and partly personal experience. The book looks at how the hardware manufacturers and publishers operate for good and ill. It also covers how games are being utilized in the entertainment industry as a whole and by other establishments such as the military.

The Xbox 360 Uncloaked by Dean Takahashi
Subtitled The Real Story Behind Microsoft's Next-Generation Video Game Console this was Takahashi’s follow-up to his equally illuminating book on the original Xbox launch. He takes full advantage of an amazing depth of contacts to recount the soap opera of a hardware launch and life at Microsoft.


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